ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of the popular video app TikTok, has reached a $92 million agreement following a class-action lawsuit from a group of users in the United States over data privacy concerns.
According to documents filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, ByteDance agreed to the proposed settlement after “an expert-led inside look at TikTok’s source code,” extensive mediation efforts, and over a year of litigation.
The group of 21 federal lawsuits, some of which are filed on behalf of minors, claim the TikTok app "infiltrates its users’ devices and extracts a broad array of private data including biometric data and content that defendants use to track and profile TikTok users for the purpose of, among other things, ad targeting and profit."
It also allegesTikTok "unlawfully transmitted class members’ personal and private viewing histories to third parties like Facebook and Google" and that the company does not "adequately disclose that user data collected from Plaintiffs is stored and shared with affiliates in countries outside the United States, such as China